When one job board is not enough Sometimes, you will need to use more than one job board in your online recruitment campaign. In this article we look at why this might be the case and how to combine job boards to ensure success for your job vacancy advertisement.

Why use more than one job board?

A successful online recruitment campaign is all about reaching the maximum number of relevant candidates and that is all about choosing the right job board (c.f. “How to choose the right job site.”) But even if you choose the right job board, it is seldom the case that it will be the only job board that has all of the relevant job seekers for your job ad. In other words, to reach all of the relevant candidates for your job you may need to use a number of different job boards.

Combining job boards for success

To illustrate this, let's look at at a couple of jobs: a Marketing Manager (for an FMCG); and a Marketing assistant (for a online travel website.) This pyramid represents the marketing career. At the bottom of the pyramid are many people working as Marketing assistants (entry level). As you move up the career ladder the number of suitable people decreases.

We can also see that the FMCG industry represents a large portion of marketing candidates. FMCG is a well established and large industry sector, will have lots of jobs and, therefore, lots of available candidates. Online Media, on the other hand, is a much smaller and much newer sector and, therefore, marketing staff with this skill set will be fewer. Now let's have a look at how a different job boards might cover these jobs.

Job board A:

Job board A is a typical generalist site and provides a good number of lower level candidates in the more popular industry sectors. In addition, like many generalist job boards, Jobboard A is less effective the higher up the career ladder we move. It is strong at FMCG but less so in Online Media. From this graphic we can see that Jobboard A offers some coverage of the two job areas we are looking for.

Job board B:

Job board B is a specialist Marketing Jobs jobboard. Like many specialist job boards, it is better at senior jobs.  From this graphic we can see that Job board B would be a good bet for our FMCG Marketing Manager job but would be next to useless for our online media Marketing Assistant.

Job board C:

What job boards should we combine?

As we saw above, no job board provides complete coverage of any job, so we will need to combine two job boards to improve our chances of success.

Marketing Manager FMCG = Job board A & Job board B

Marketing  Assistant online media = Job bard A & Job board C

4 tips for combining job boards 

It would be great if every time you were going to advertise a job, you could get a detailed breakdown of what areas job boards cover as in the example above. Unfortunately, that never happens. Using whatjobsite will give you pointers as to the strengths of particular sites, but you still have to decide whether to use one or more sites. Here's our advice on how to decide:-

1. As a rule of thumb, the more standard the job, the more likely you will be able to fill the job by advertising on just one job board.
2. Once you start having specific or complicated requirements, the number of available candidates decreases and you will have to consider broadening your advertising to more than one job board.
3. Use job boards in turn. Start with the job board that you think will be the best and then after a week or two, add the others. The reason for doing things incrementally is that you can learn from your mistakes as you go along and you can avoid wasting money on sites when you have already got good candidates.
4. Give yourself plenty of time to recruit. Remember, the more complicated the job, the longer it's going to take to fill.

Article updated: May 2008 

Photo: © Bora Ucak | Dreamstime.com  

We hope this article has been of help to you. For more information and articles on online recruitment advertising please visit our Recruitment Advice area. If you would like to comment on any of them or on whatjobsite in general, please click here to email us. To find the right job sites and job boards to advertise your vacancies, use the search box above. To find specialist or niche job sites to advertise your vacancies click here.

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